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Speech, time, motion- in what sense are these
quantities?
Let us begin with speech. It is subject to measurement, but only
in so far as it is sound; it is not a quantity in its essential
nature, which nature is that it be significant, as noun and verb
are significant. The air is its Matter, as it is Matter to verb
and noun, the components of speech.
To be more precise, we may define speech as an impact [made upon
the outer air by the breath], though it is not so much the impact
as the impression which the impact produces and which, as it
were, imposes Form [upon the air]. Speech, thus, is rather an
action than a quantity- an action with a significance. Though
perhaps it would be truer to say that while this motion, this
impact, is an action, the counter-motion is an experience [or
Passion]; or each may be from different points of view either an
action or an experience: or we may think of speech as action upon
a substrate [air] and experience within that substrate.
If however voice is not characteristically impact, but is simply
air, two categories will be involved: voice is significant, and
the one category will not be sufficient to account for this
significance without associating with a second.
With regard to time, if it is to be thought of as a measure, we
must determine what it is that applies this measure. It must
clearly be either Soul or the Present Moment. If on the contrary
we take time to be something measured and regard it as being of
such and such extension- a year, for example- then we may
consider it as a quantity: essentially however time is of a
different nature; the very fact that we can attribute this or
that length to it shows us that it is not length: in other words,
time is not Quantity. Quantity in the strict sense is the
Quantity not inbound with things; if things became quantities by
mere participation in Quantity, then Substance itself would be
identical with Quantity.
Equality and inequality must be regarded as properties of
Quantity-Absolute, not of the participants, or of them not
essentially but only accidentally: such participants as "three
yards' length," which becomes a quantity, not as belonging to a
single genus of Quantity, but by being subsumed under the one
head, the one category.
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